If you are a maintenance planner or maintenance manager at a large commercial and industrial facility one of your jobs will be to prepare a maintenance budget and get it approved. This will decide how much money you have available for maintenance management, hiring employees and training. This can be a daunting task to do especially since you will have no way of predicting the costs of future equipment breakdowns. Maintenance management typically involves a lot of money due to the costs of labor, materials and other charges. A good maintenance software package (CMMS software) can help you get a handle on such costs that will help you prepare a more realistic budget.

When Making Your Maintenance Budget What Should You Consider?

Preventive maintenance costs: These costs are more predictable since once you define the maintenance tasks and the frequency you want them done, the CMMS software can calculate future scheduled dates and expected costs for parts and labor. You can use maintenance software reports for future periods to get an idea of expected costs. For example in our FastMaint CMMS maintenance software we have a Location History report that could be used to calculate future maintenance costs by Location.

Breakdown maintenance costs:These costs are by their very nature unpredictable – since you cannot know when equipment will breakdown and what you have to do to fix it. Here using historical data from your CMMS software will be useful to get an idea of possible costs.

Employee & contractor costs: In many cases employee costs for maintenance work are rolled up labor costs in work orders. Costs for contractors can be calculated from work orders that are done by them. Employee costs for a salary or regular wages need to be calculated separately.

Parts & supplies costs:These costs can be estimated from costs for parts and supplies used on work orders – both preventive and breakdown. Again look for reports in your maintenance software that can allow you to estimate part costs – historical and in the future.

Tool replacement costs: These are costs incurred in replacing tools that have become damaged or no longer useful. Estimating these costs can be harder but you can use historical data to get an idea of when tools need to be replaced and how much it will cost.

Once you are able to get estimates for costs under these different heads you will be able to put together a budget estimate. You will need to justify expenses under each head and provide fairly strong justification of why you need money for a particular expense. Otherwise management has a habit of cutting items they do not understand especially when they are under pressure to reduce unnecessary expenses!

Using Reports From Your CMMS/ Maintenance Software

If you do not currently have maintenance software or are unable to get these reports from software you currently have, you can download a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS. Use it to set up the preventive maintenance tasks you expect for the next year. Once done you can try to generate work order reports/ assorted item history reports for future dates to get an idea of scheduled preventive maintenance works orders and the expected costs.